On September 17, thousands of pagers belonging to the militant organisation Hezbollah detonated across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut. The following day another round of attacks happened, this time on handheld radio sets as well as cellphones and laptops which left 20 people dead and more than 450 people injured.

Hezbollah is known to use pagers as a low tech communication ecosystem to evade Israeli location detection techniques. It is reported to have recently deployed about 5,000 new such devices from a Taiwanese company Gold Apollo whose Hungarian supplier is also being mentioned in the attack. Explosives to the measure of three grams, slotted near the battery of the pagers, connected to the remote command slot are being reported as the cause of the explosions. Likewise the hand held radio sets were also recently procured and had the logos of the Japanese manufacturer Icom.

Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/pager-attack-in-lebanon-violence-digital-techniques-9576343/